My home theater has been written about fairly extensively in this magazine. But there’s one part of my house that I haven’t talked about in print before: my attic. My kids refer to it as the Audio Museum.

It started innocently enough. After moving into a new house a few years ago, I felt I finally had the space to bring out all of the LPs I’d been saving in boxes in my basement and set up my turntable again. Some other vintage gear that had been banked in storage finally had somewhere to go, too. For example, I found my old cassette player. I was never a big fan of cassettes. It was so hard to skip ahead (or back!) to the right spot to access the song I wanted to hear. The sound was better than 8-tracks but still worse than radio. Most of the cassettes I owned were mix tapes I made of my favorite songs. That was the beauty of them: They gave you the ability to make your own playlist. That’s about all I think I’m able to put in the cassette plus column, though.

I put the attic museum together partly to be functional and partly for show. For this column, I decided to go up there and try everything out. The following is my perception of Then vs. the reality of Now.